Like this:

Master rhetorician,
Jesus from Nazareth,
knew the primacy of the law
in the minds of the people
who ran religion in his country.
He felt the weight of the shadow
cast across a millennium
by Moses, knowing how his words
had sought to guide the nation
and to inform the lives of its citizens.
It was part of the deal with the Almighty,
constructing limits to bad behaviour,
and establishing righteousness
and justice as the preferred shapes
of national life.
“You have heard it said,’
he was wont to say, cleverly
grounding his teachings in the law,
“But I say to you;”
cunningly suggesting that there might be
a worthwhile idea/thought/action
that takes us beyond law.
He was also wont
to name that possible something
as generosity, forgiveness,
and love.

Like this:

With the coming of Word
at the beginning of the second act,
Grace and Truth
stride purposefully to centre stage
to take up their allotted positions.
Law, having featured so strongly in act one,
is, according to the script,
directed to move upstage
and to quietly exit to the right.
Law moves with deliberate steps,
then pauses,
relishing the lingering spotlight,
which, for loyalty or fear, perhaps both,
seems reluctant to trust
the new leads to carry the show.
Law’s assured and comfortable lines
seduce and enthral,
delivered with the much-practised ease
of one who has held the proscenium for centuries.
The spectators are less than convinced
by the unfamiliar and surprising utterances
of Grace and Truth.
The play pauses awkwardly,
perplexing the audience;
some begin to leave.

Like this:

Put them to shame, Jesus:
those pompous guardians of Sabbath law
whose self-enforced enslavement
causes them to overlook
things of wonder, grace and beauty.

Put them to shame, Jesus:
the offence-takers
who kill hope and close their eyes
to love’s possibilities.
The law has not saved the woman,
bent and broken for eighteen years;
she is also a child of God.

Teach them, Jesus,
that liberation and truth will not be denied,
and that grace abounds and extends,
unconfined by our fears
or the hardness of our hearts.
Put them to shame, Jesus;
put them to shame.

Meta

Ken Rookes

Ken is a poet and an artist, among other things. He is also a Minister of the Uniting Church in Australia. In 2011 he self-published a book of poetry, Promptings and Provocations.
Ken currently lives in California Gully, Victoria. He is working out how to use his time in retirement, mostly through poetry and art. From 2013 - 2015, he lived at Willowra, a remote Warlpiri community in the Northern Territory, where his wife, Jane was School Principal.
Most of Ken's poems are responses to the three-year lectionary cycle of bible readings. An exploration of posts from three / six years earlier should reveal other poems responding to the same readings.